Vail residents Harmony Honeker, left, Roger A. Smith and Elizabeth Webb, a Vail community volunteer resident and business owner, near the proposed TEP substation site.

Benjie Sanders / Arizona Daily Star 2008

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Nan Cowly and Sherri Stinnett didn't hold back their joy Monday: They drove through their Vail neighborhood waving a sign that read, "We Won!" and beeped their car horns repeatedly.

They were celebrating after they and their Southeast Side neighbors won two victories before a state commission that rejected one section of a proposed Tucson Electric Power Co. line and a substation. Residents also got a second planned substation moved from two existing subdivisions.

"I am totally, totally stoked," said Cowly, a 44-year-old photographer and mother of two. "I'm ecstatic, excited, elated. I don't know exactly which word really describes what I am."

Cowly has lived with her family in New Dawn Estates about four years. She said that if TEP had been able to carry out its initial proposals, her family would have been affected by having power lines run near their property.

"Our neighbors up the road would have been more affected by the substation," she said. "It just made no sense for them to have it there."

Residents in New Dawn Estates and Vail Vista Estates — north and south of Dawn Drive near Colossal Cave Road — had asked if the substation could be built west of Colossal Cave Road instead of where TEP initially proposed, which is near their subdivisions.

On the more controversial section, the Arizona Corporation Commission voted 4-1 against approving the second phase of a proposed nine-mile power line and accompanying substation that would have landed in a lush Sonoran Desert area that county officials want to preserve.

Commissioners generally agreed with residents and a developer in the area who said TEP had failed to prove the line would be needed to serve growth. That was primarily because of county preservation plans for the area.

But TEP attorney Matt Derstine said that if the power-line approval is delayed several years, the effects on landowners will be magnified because there will be more owners planning to build homes..

"Do we wait for growth or plan for it?" Derstine said. "Do we wait for increased demand, for people to build, for people to move out there, and then when demand outstrips the power, we come in and build on back fences?"The commission also voted 5-0 to approve TEP's request for the first phase of that power line running along Interstate 10 from Houghton Road east to the Vail area, and for a substation that would be just west of Vail near Wentworth Road.

A controversy over this project was averted Friday when TEP officials and several residents agreed on a plan pushed by residents to move the substation 2,000 feet west of its previous location.

Defeat of the Phase II power line and substation will give Pima County time to buy the land in the Cienega Corridor, commissioners said. County officials have so far bought only one major parcel, the 1,700-acre Bar V Ranch in 2005.

Much of the surrounding land, which includes thousands of acres of state-land grazing leases, would be preserved under a proposed statewide initiative that would save 570,000 acres of state land. The measure is in limbo now because authorities ruled last week that it didn't have enough signatures to make the November ballot.

Commissioners also cited heavy opposition to the Phase II project not just from Vail-area residents and environmental groups, but by a 5-0 vote of the county Board of Supervisors in July.

"We need to give Pima County a chance to go out and make a play for this land," Commissioner Kris Mayes said. "If we were to approve this line, we could make that almost a moot point."

But the county has had years to buy this state land and hasn't even taken the first step, pointed out the lone supporter of TEP's Phase II plan, commission Chairman Mike Gleason.

"They haven't done it and with this denial, they will do nothing," Gleason said. "They won't have to do anything. Pretty soon they've got to buy that land, and you've got to have money. Pima County will not have the money to buy that land. We will be back someday."

Later, Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry said that the county would definitely be trying to buy state land in that area if a package to overhaul state law to make conservation easier were approved by voters and the Legislature.

Residents Cowly and Stinnett, who both live in New Dawn Estates, worked with another Vail resident, Elizabeth Webb to negotiate with TEP.

Webb, 40, said the outcome is what they were hoping for, but it was costly for everyone involved in terms of both money and time.

"I never expect for anything positive to happen because I'm a cynic," she said. "I never expect to win when I'm engaged in these kinds of things."

Stinnett, 45, moved into the subdivision last September with her husband and son. Neither phase would have been in their backyard, but Stinnett said she was still concerned.

"As a community, we wanted to support all of our neighbors," she said.

On Saturday, Cowly said the neighborhood residents plan to hold a celebration party.